Page:The Soft Side (New York, The Macmillan Company, 1900).djvu/150

142 'Why, just the little French tricks,' said the Master: on which their friend had to pretend to admit, when pressed by Mrs. Mallow, that these æsthetic vices had been the objects of his dread.

 III

' now,' Lance said to him the next year, 'why you were so much against it.' He had come back, supposedly for a mere interval, and was looking about him at Carrara Lodge, where indeed he had already, on two or three occasions, since his expatriation, briefly appeared. This had the air of a longer holiday. 'Something rather awful has happened to me. It isn't so very good to know.'

'I'm bound to say high spirits don't show in your face,' Peter was rather ruefully forced to confess. 'Still, are you very sure you do know?'

'Well, I at least know about as much as I can bear.' These remarks were exchanged in Peter's den, and the young man, smoking cigarettes, stood before the fire with his back against the mantel. Something of his bloom seemed really to have left him.

Poor Peter wondered. 'You're clear then as to what in particular I wanted you not to go for?'

'In particular?' Lance thought. 'It seems to me that, in particular, there can have been but one thing.'

They stood for a little sounding each other. 'Are you quite sure?'

'Quite sure I'm a beastly duffer? Quite—by this time.'

'Oh!' and Peter turned away as if almost with relief.

'It's that that isn't pleasant to find out.'

'Oh, I don't care for "that," said Peter, presently coming round again. 'I mean I personally don't.'

'Yet I hope you can understand a little that I myself should!' 